On today, the fateful day that the grandest free host of them all, Geocities, closed, I wanted to look back on my memories of the service. I think like many people who grew up in the 90′s, my start in creating webpages was with Geocities. I remember a friend of mine in high school, Graham, who had started his own webpage. I was instantly interested, being the geek that I am, even though I didn’t actually have an internet enabled computer at the time. Graham gave me a simple piece of paper outlining how to format a link, how to embed an image, bold and italic text and how an html page was structured.

After getting that piece of paper I was off and running. Back then Geocities was organized into neighbourhoods that each had a theme. You just picked an area that matched the theme of your site and you were good to go. In my Star Wars obsessed teens I wanted to create the ultimate Star Wars site called Wedge’s Hangar Bay, so I picked the UFO themed Area51 to host my site. I really wish the site still existed, but from what I remember it pretty much looked like every other Geocities site from the 90′s. The background was a starry sky, as was mandatory for every Star Wars site at the time. The content was a hodgepodge of stuff that didn’t go together, but I didn’t know any better. The features I remember having was one called Wedge’s Ramblings, which I would probably call a precursor to this very blog. Back then it was a static page with some random rants, but it was definitely blogging before there was actually a term for blogging. And also on that site I started the site OasisCentral, which ended up being my fixation for years afterwards. After awhile I outgrew Geocities and moved on, but it still definitely holds a fond place in my heart after all these years.

For more on Geocities, check out ComedyCentral’s 7 Retro Things We’ll Miss Forever